Monday, March 26, 2007

School achievement, perceptions of ability and interest change as children age

School achievement, perceptions of ability and interest change aschildren age

Children in early grades may like a subject in which they don t feelvery competent, or they may feel competent in a subject in spite of poorgrades. But by the end of high school, children generally feel mostinterested in subjects in which they feel they are the strongest.

Those are the findings of a new study published in the March-April 2007issue of the journal Child Development. The study also found that boysare more likely than girls to have their interest and abilities match.For example, boys are more likely to get the best grades in the schoolsubjects in which they are most interested, whereas girls may get goodgrades regardless of their interest level.

The researchers, from Humboldt University and the University ofMichigan, examined the ties between achievement, ability perceptions,and interest by looking at a group of almost 1,000 children from firstgrade until they left high school. Each year, they asked how much thechildren were interested in doing math, English, music, sports, andscience, and how well they thought they were doing in those subjects. Inaddition, they recorded the students grades in those subjects and, foreach child, computed the closeness of the match among the three schooldimensions.

The findings of the current study are interesting because they show howchildren become increasingly specialized in terms of their academicprofiles, showing high levels of achievement, perceptions of ability,and interest in some subjects and low levels in others, said the study'slead author Jaap J.A. Denissen, formerly of Humboldt University, now apostdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University. This specialization could bea good thing, as it allows children to focus their energy and becomeexperts in a certain field. On the other hand, when the labor marketrequires flexibility, a more generalist approach may be more helpful.Our finding that boys are more likely to be specialists whereas femalesare more likely to be generalists may explain some of the sexdifferences in academic and vocational careers.

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The study was funded, in part, by the National Institute of Child Healthand Human Development.

Summarized from Child Development, Vol. 78, Issue 2, I like to do it, Im able and I know I am: Longitudinal Couplings between Domain-SpecificAchievement, Self-Concept, and Interest by Denissen, JJA (HumboldtUniversity), and Zarrett, NR, and Eccles, JS (University of Michigan).Copyright 2007 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. Allrights reserved.